Recent reviews by Raykushi

I'll give you this - Rivals of Aether 2 perfected the most important thing about the platform fighter genre; the movement. It's silky smooth and responsive, there isn't any weird latency or delay when pushing your buttons like many other games of this type do. That, more than anything in my opinion, is imperative to get right or else the game falls apart.

However, good movement options and responsive controls by themselves do not make a good game, and unfortunately, Rivals of Aether 2 falls short in many other areas. It's tutorials, compared to Rivals of Aether 1, are lacklustre, and there are multiple mechanics that exist that are absolutely crucial to know (like Crouch Cancelling, which shouldn't even exist), and not knowing, understanding, or utilizing them will put you at a major disadvantage.

The game's casual offers are much like other fighting games, very minimal story and an arcade mode that can be decent for new players to practice against admittedly competent CPU's. These modes are dry though, and the crux of the game's value lies in fighting against other players, particularly Online.

It is in playing Online, and especially ranked, where the game's true shortcomings come to light - the combat and balance. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the "skill diff" crowd, many of the characters in this game are simply too powerful. It seems that Fleet and Loxodont, the only original characters in Rivals 2, are also the only well designed characters - being developed from the ground up with the mechanics of Rivals of Aether 2 in mind likely helped in that. It's all the original veterans who are the problem.

It's pretty apparent that the veterans were not designed with the new mechanics in mind - many things that were weaknesses, such as recovery, and significantly improved with the new ledge. Many of them have incredible offence, speed, range, and lack of end lag, combined with new defensive options, the characters can just do too many things with complete impunity. While that might make you think "wow so everyone sounds really hype", what it ends up being in practice is a game of cat and mouse of extremely safe options, and typically looking for an opening that can't be escaped via mashing or crouch cancelling. Because of how good everyone is and how quick every option is, paradoxically it causes so few meaningful variable interactions, and most of them tend to be very RPS heavy. If a Ranno down-air's your shield, do you parry the predicted follow-up aerial, or do you hold shield and risk getting grabbed? In both cases, Ranno has near infinite mixup but can rarely ever be punished. For how powerful Ranno's offense is for example, it can be very hard to reliably combo him because of his low end lag, and even when you catch him out, he has a frame 3 lingering Neutral-Air - stuff like that seems excessive for a character to have.

Characters being so powerful creates a strange situation where every character is fun to play as, but every character is dreadful to play against. There are some other examples of what I would perceive to be pretty questionable balancing decisions, but because the game is so new, I'd rather not date the review too heavily by giving too many specific examples - I hope that the game receives good balance updates soon.

Lastly, the game seems to have a problem with it's connectivity. I very frequently have insane spikes in rollback frames, which in Rivals, causes characters to move much faster than usual and start blinking all over the place. I've played a variety of online games, both fighting games and others, with rollback and with peer-to-peer, and Rivals 2 is among the most inconsistent connections I've ever had playing any game.

As it stands, I have recommended people *not* purchase the game when asked for my opinion. It's entirely too frustrating in it's current state, and if I was given the option to uninstall the game and still receive a refund, I'd likely take it. It's close to being an enjoyable experience, but would need a lot of work. If you're looking for a good platform fighter experience though, I could definitely recommend Rivals of Aether 1.

RoA2 still has a long way to go.

If you were going to require PSN accounts you should have mandated it from the start. This whole fiasco was handled in just about the worst possible way it could have been. I don't even see the benefits outweighing the risks - Helldivers 2 had overwhelming positive public perception. Sony's decision has tarnished that streak. What a shame it is.

Here's the issue currently with the system and why people have problems with it over other games. Different players opt for different gameplay styles, that's the point of there being such a large selection of characters, not just because we like the designs, but because they all fulfill archetypes, in fact each of the characters were designed with archetypes in mind. Now, if someone who loves swordies plays this game and doesn't get to play swordie right away, but now is being asked to play characters they don't want to play for potentially a VERY long time with no assurance that they'll get the characters they want from the lootbox (and despite the name change make no mistake it's a lootbox), the game is not going to be attractive to them. If people could unlock characters through a mission or objective system rather than boxes it might have been alright, but locking characters when there are so few means locking out whole gameplay styles. It doesn't help that the game is so similar to smash, both in aesthetic and in functionality, that people will look at it, see the work needed to unlock just 1 character, see that they have no choice in who that character is, and probably decide that there isn't anything pressing about the game that would warrant playing it over Smash or even other platform fighters.

My opinion? The game plays well, and the connection to your opponent along with things like input delay is probably the best I've seen. From a concept and creativity perspective, the game falls flat on it's face. Despite knowing Zhurong's name, I can't help but still refer to her as Marth, and that is a really bad thing - because the characters in Icon's become a bastardized version of Smash characters, rather than having their own identity. Most attempts to differentiate the characters from their Smash counterparts tend to come at the expense of the balance; such as giving Marth/Zhurong a paralysing projectile, which defeats the purpose of a sword as a disjointed weapon anyway. I wanted to support this game, but seeing some of these characters, I find it impossible to support what to me seems like blatant plagiarism of other games, namely Smash.

Wavedash Games has a great PR team and staff who are very good at getting the message across that developers listen to their audience, which is nice. However, only so many mistakes can be made before the public will lose interest, no matter how much a team makes it apparent that they are willing to go back and fix them. Games in this day and age often live and die by their first impressions. In the case of Icons: Combat Arena, they've squandered 2 of them: Their innitial reveal at EVO, and again in Early Access. I'm pretty lenient on stuff like that, especially from a new developer, but the public is a lot less forgiving about that kind of thing than I am, and I fear that such bad public perception of the game will create a wave of negative momentum that will be nearly impossible recover from.